A Few Words on the Villain Plots in The Dark Knight Trilogy

It was pretty interesting to rewatch The Dark Knight films recently – I hadn’t seen any of them in quite a while, and I enjoyed going back to them now that I’m more comic-book-film-literate than I was back when I first saw them.  Viewing them again, I find the cracks more noticeable, but they’re still awfully good and have an important place in the current generation of comic book movies.  (Climax spoilers for each movie in the trilogy.)

Watching all three films in fairly close succession, I was struck by a major thematic thread that works through each of the movies’ main plots.  Quick recap before we start.  In Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows lace Gotham’s water supply with an extremely-potent hallucinogen that will make the people wild with terror.  In The Dark Knight, the Joker does a ton of different, crazy things without much real purpose, mainly seeking to cause chaos.  However, the big climactic set-piece is his “prisoner’s dilemma on a boat” scenario in which the passengers on two ferries (including one loaded with actual prisoners) hold detonators for explosives wired up to the other ship, the idea being that the Joker will blow up both boats if one doesn’t detonate the other before an appointed time.  And in The Dark Knight Rises, Bane is quite the work horse:  he destabilizes Gotham’s economy, traps its police underground, cuts it off from the rest of the world, hides a Gotham-destroying bomb somewhere in it, and hands the city over to the have-nots, essentially telling them to party like it’s the Reign of Terror. 

So, what do these plans have in common?  Well, they all involve fear and chaos, but more than that, they all involve the villains merely setting the wheels in motion.  Ra’s al Ghul frontloads his plot by contaminating the water, Bane knocks over many dominoes in quick succession, and the Joker orchestrates an elaborate game of mental torture.  I mean, sure, all three will kill people directly if the mood strikes – the Joker is particularly fond of the old ultraviolence – and both Bane and the Joker’s plots include the threat of blowing people up with bombs.  The intriguing part, though, is how much they accomplish without setting off those bombs, much like Ra’s al Ghul deploys his weaponized hallucinogen and then kicks back to watch it all play out.

That’s because, for each of them, their main plan isn’t to destroy Gotham – it’s to maneuver Gotham into a position in which it destroys itself.  Ra’s al Ghul waits for the drugged population, crazed with fear, to tear each other apart.  The Joker’s prisoner’s dilemma is more of a microcosm, since it focuses on the passengers of the two boats rather than the city at large, but the intention is the same; he doesn’t have to trigger the bombs on either ship because the situation pits both groups of passengers against one another, and it’s all about waiting to see which one will break first.  Bane sets up an impending doomsday, knocks out the infrastructure, and demolishes the escape routes, and then it’s just a matter of letting mob rule take over.

I like this theme, because I feel like it’s a cooler, subtler way to discuss the corruption and waywardness of Gotham (as opposed to the literal discussion of said subject in the films, which gets heavy-handed.)  Here’s a town so lost that the bad guys don’t even need to bring it down; they just nudge it into place, and it’ll do the rest of the work for them.  In light of all this self-destruction, 1) it’s even better when ordinary Gothamites stand up and refuse to be what the world thinks of them, and 2) it speaks more highly of Bruce that he recognizes that this “damned” city is still worth saving.